I slipped across the floor, clutching my earrings, my feet making loose tiles clink together. I closed the door softly behind me.

Cornelia was standing out in the hallway. The brown dress she wore had been repaired in several places and was not as clean as it could be. As I brushed past her she said in a low, eager voice, “You could give them to me.” Her greedy eyes were laughing.

I reached over and slapped her.

When I got back to Market Square I stopped by the star in the center and looked down at the pearls in my hand. I could not keep them. What would I do with them? I could not tell Pieter how I came to have them—it would mean explaining everything that had happened so long ago. I could not wear the earrings anyway—a butcher’s wife did not wear such things, no more than a maid did.

I walked around the star several times. Then I set out for a place I had heard of but never been to, tucked away in a back street behind the New Church. I would not have visited such a place ten years before.

The man’s trade was keeping secrets. I knew that he would ask me no questions, nor tell anyone that I had gone to him. After seeing so many goods come and go, he was no longer curious about the stories behind them. He held the earrings up to the light, bit them, took them outside to squint at them.

“Twenty guilders,” he said.

I nodded, took the coins he held out, and left without looking back.

There were five extra guilders I would not be able to explain. I separated five coins from the others and held them tight in my fist. I would hide them somewhere that Pieter and my sons would not look, some unexpected place that only I knew of.

I would never spend them.

Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the most helpful and readable sources on seventeenth-century Holland is Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987). What little is known about Vermeer’s life and family has been thoroughly documented by John Montias in Vermeer and His Milieu (1989). The catalogue for the 1996 Vermeer exhibition has beautiful reproductions and clear analyses of the paintings.

I would like to thank Philip Steadman, Nicola Costaras, Humphrey Ocean, and Joanna Woodall for talking with me about various aspects of Vermeer’s work. Mick Bartram, Ora Dresner, Nina Killham, Dale Reynolds, and Robert and Angela Royston all made helpful and supportive comments about the manuscript in progress. Thanks, finally, to my agent, Jonny Geller, and my editor, Susan Watt, for doing what they do so well.